Pyramid Lake (6 page)

Standing in the empty corridor, McNulty held out a hand to indicate the direction she had gone. “Trevor, I’d like you to meet Cassie Winnemucca. PhD, Caltech. Winner of the 2012 ACM Turing Award. She comes to us from Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, where she was a key part of the team responsible for the Sequoia supercomputer.”

I stared down the empty hallway. “Oh.”

T
wenty minutes later, I was in the sanctum, slumped in my beanbag chair and scrolling through an IEEE research paper on the big screen, when the click of heels on the tiles below alerted me to a visitor. I swiped the trackpad to hide what I was reading, as Cassie’s head and shoulders came into sight. She climbed the ramp, stopping to stand awkwardly at the top.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “I spoke to McNulty already. But I thought I’d come by to tell you…” She frowned. “What were you reading?”

Her published IEEE and ACM papers. “Nothing very interesting.”

“Anyway, before I left I wanted to apologize. For what I said.”

“What you said…?”

“To go fuck yourself. I don’t normally say things like that to people.”

“Oh.”

She peered at the screen, where the desktop image was now visible—Amy with a gap-toothed five-year-old’s grin.

“Is that your daughter?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, then, best of luck with everyth—”

A rumbling metallic voice drowned her out, rattling the glass tiles of the raised floor beneath our feet and echoing from the server racks all around. “Trevor, I see your new research partner has returned,” it said. “Should I continue to monitor and record what she’s feeling now? Or will you only be interested in her earlier visit when we talk later?”

Cassie’s eyes widened.

“‘Talk later’ means after she’s left.” I tossed the keyboard aside. “Nice going.”

I didn’t need Frankenstein to tell me what Cassie was feeling now. Emotions played across her face in rapid sequence—surprise to anger, to disgust, to overwhelming curiosity—all in less than a second.

Sliding the strap of her laptop bag off her shoulder, she slowly lowered it to the floor tiles. “I think the plan was for you to show me around the facility,” she said.

“H
ow much do you know about DARPA?” I asked.

Cassie considered the question as we walked down the hall toward the other labs. “Well, DARPA focuses on high-risk, high-reward projects that give the U.S. a decisive long-term technical edge over our enemies, and prevent strategic surprise in future conflicts.”

“Guess you read the mission statement,” I said. “Forget that. We tackle the big, hairy tech problems that are too hard for anyone else. The stuff we create changes the world.”

“Like the Internet,” she said.

“No, that wasn’t us. It was Al Gore.”

“DARPA’s small,” she said. “A lot smaller than LLNL was. And a lot less structured, it seems—”

“Less pointless bureaucratic inefficiency, you mean.”

“Call it what you want. I can’t believe how informally the whole facility appears to be run. That’ll take some getting used to, if I do end up staying.”

Don’t worry,
I thought.
You won’t
.

“DARPA cherry-picks the best and brightest talent from academia, industry, and government,” I said. “They don’t believe in babysitting us. They turn us loose, give us access to the resources we need, and then we get things done—for the most part through partnerships with industry, but when necessary, we bring key projects in-house to make sure they get done right—particularly on the black side.”

A spark of anger in her eyes. “My TS/SCI is current from my LLNL work.”

My earlier comments hung in the air between us, making things awkward. I must have been half asleep when McNulty brought her in, because in retrospect, the last-minute political-hire theory was pretty dumb. To work at Pyramid Lake, she needed a Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance like mine, and the background investigation for the TS/SCI took months.

“We’ve got four active DARPA projects at Pyramid Lake right now.” I stopped in front of the door to Kate’s lab and raised my key card to the lock. “MADRID, which is mine. Kate’s Autonomous Formation-Flying OctoRotor Swarm—AFFORS—which you’re about to see. And then after lunch, we’ll check out Blake’s dorky robots and Roger’s boring composites.”

“Lunch?” she said. “It’s almost three.”

“So? I’m hungry.” I slid the key card and the door lock buzzed. We went in.

Kate and her team of four had cleared the lab’s auditorium-size central area, where the ceiling rose two stories, and marked out a grid of one-foot-square cells with black tape on the floor. In the center of the room, two dozen small shapes, each the size of a model helicopter, hovered in the air, making an evenly spaced pattern. The OctoRotors floated in eerie silence.

Kate stood next to a monitor, hunched over and typing. One of the OctoRotors lay on the work surface next to her. A soldering iron sat on a holder alongside it, still smoking. She looked up at me, and the eager expression on her face soured. “Oh, great,” she said. “What do
you
want—?”

Then, spotting Cassie, she straightened up.

“Kate, Cassie,” I said. “Cassie, Kate.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Kate came forward and extended a hand to shake Cassie’s. She looked at Cassie with curiosity.

“I’m joining the MADRID team,” Cassie said. “I’ll be working with Trevor.”

“Oh,” Kate said. “I’m so sorry.”

I ignored Kate’s insult. What Cassie had just said caught me by surprise. When had she decided to stay?

“You should be glad someone actually wants to see your little toys,” I said to Kate. “But we don’t have all day. Show us what you showed Linebaugh. The demo, I mean—skip the PowerPoint slides.”

“What’s wrong with your hand?” Kate asked.

“Caught it in a door,” I said. Cassie’s face darkened, but she didn’t say anything.

Kate picked up the half-assembled OctoRotor from the workbench and held it out to Cassie. It looked like a pair of giant water-strider bugs stuck back to back. The eight round rotor guards resembled the circles a water strider’s legs made on the surface of a pond.

“The AFFORS hardware is pretty basic,” Kate said. “Each unit is made of carbon-fiber polymer, weighs two kilograms, and uses a configuration of eight steel rotors to hover and maneuver. They can reach speeds of up to seventy miles an hour, but that’s not really what they’re designed for. At higher speeds, the rotors get noisy and we lose stealth, and they don’t really have great battery life yet. Their primary design mission is to complement the warfighter in urban environments, performing autonomous real-time surveillance and mapping.”

“Kate’s brothers didn’t let her play model airplanes with them when she was a kid,” I said. She and Cassie both ignored me.

“The blades are sharp,” Cassie said, fingering the circular plastic Frisbee rim that bordered a rotor. “I can see why you need these guards.”

“The edge profile of the rotors reduces audio signature at lower speeds. But like I said, the hardware’s pretty basic. It’s the software that makes AFFORS special.” She walked back to her keyboard and entered a few commands.

The hovering OctoRotors in the center of the room swarmed into motion, swirling around and past each other in a synchronized pattern. The midair collision that seemed imminent at any second never happened.

Kate nodded toward the swarm. “Since he’s not much use for anything else, maybe Trevor can demonstrate their collision-avoidance capabilities.”

“No way,” I said. “I don’t trust your programming.”

“Chickenshit,” she said, and walked into the center of the swirling cluster of OctoRotors. Cassie stiffened, but the pattern continued to move around Kate, never touching her, diverting and reforming with minimal adjustments as she moved through it. She reached up and swept her arms around, as if trying to grab one of the little flyers, but they moved just far enough to avoid her fingertips.

“Wow,” Cassie said, smiling. “Amazing.”

Kate pointed toward one of her assistants, and he tapped on the keyboard. The pattern changed, dividing. Six intersecting circles of OctoRotors now orbited Kate at different angles, like electrons around the nucleus of a model atom.

Kate walked toward us, and the bands of circling OctoRotors moved forward with her. Cassie took a step back, but I held my ground.

The assistant entered another command on the keyboard, and the OctoRotors scattered toward the back of the open lab space. A moment later, they were flying toward us again, carrying colorful brick-size blocks underneath, held by small manipulator arms. The first group of OctoRotors deposited the blocks—sturdy cardboard toys—on the floor grid, making a spaced rectangle. A second row, a third, and a fourth rapidly appeared atop the first as the OctoRotors fetched more blocks. Each level was offset from the one below, creating an airy geometric structure that twisted as it rose higher and higher from the floor.

I had seen Kate’s demo for Linebaugh on Friday, so instead I watched Cassie out of the corner of my eye. She was clapping, a delighted grin on her face. Shit.

“Amazing!” she said again. “This is fully autonomous?”

Kate nodded.

The OctoRotors flew faster and faster, depositing row after row without colliding or tumbling the tower of blocks, which was now taller than we were. At higher speeds now, they made a faint buzz in the air.

“Well, you get the general idea,” I said. “Let’s go.” I turned and walked toward the door.

“I’m not ready to leave yet,” Cassie said. “I’ll meet you at the cafeteria.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, and left.

I
sat alone at a table by the window, looking out over the lake and wondering how to convince my new co-lead she didn’t really want to be here after all. I didn’t want to be outright rude to her, especially after our earlier misunderstanding. But I could also see she was no Bob Chen. Getting her to quit wouldn’t be easy.

I poked at my no-dressing Caesar salad with a fork. The jailhouse-tattooed guy who worked the grill had given me the stink-eye again. I hated having to monitor him every time I ordered, but I had to make sure he didn’t do anything nasty, like spit in my entrée, all because a month ago I’d forgotten a cardinal rule: never piss off somebody who is preparing your food.

“Hey, man…” Roger slid into the chair across from me. “Check this out.” He opened his hand, and something small and metallic spun on the table surface. It looked like the top half of a crayon made of silvery metal.

I picked it up in my fingers. It was surprisingly heavy. “A DU two-two-three bullet?”

“I cast some three-o-eights, three-thirty-eights, and fifties, also,” he said. “Let’s go to the range tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Tuesday,” I said. Although trying out bullets made of DU—depleted uranium—sounded fun.

“Don’t be lame,” he said. “You worked all weekend because your kid wasn’t visiting.”

“How would you know?”

“I drove by your house a few times.”

“That’s a little creepy.” I stared out the window again. “You need more friends.”

“Look who’s talking…” Roger suddenly shifted in his chair, and grabbed my arm. “Oh,
man,
you’re not gonna be-
lieve
what I’m seeing.”

Without looking, I raised a hand in an unenthusiastic wave. A moment later a chair beside me scraped as my new co-lead joined us.

“Roger, Cassie,” I said. “Cassie, Roger.”

“Holy shit.” Roger stared at her. Then he turned to me. “Trevor, you dog. When’d you two hook up?”

A look of disgust crossed Cassie’s face. I was embarrassed for Roger.

“You dumb-ass,” I said. “TS, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Roger said. “No kidding. You can’t just bring a girlfriend into a Top Secret facility for a lunch date. So, she
works
here?”

Cassie cleared her throat. “I started today, on MADRID.”

“But that’s Trev’s project,” Roger said.

She didn’t say anything to that. I liked her a little better for it.

Roger spun the DU bullet on the table and looked at her. He rubbed his goatee. “So, are you like… his assistant or something?”

“My new co-lead,” I said. “Cassie’s doctorate is from Caltech. She worked on the Sequoia at LLNL.”

“Look…” Roger leaned forward. “About what happened Friday night—”

“I’m really not interested,” Cassie said, and stood up.

I still felt bad about Tank-Top Ray and his kid’s car seat.

“I was a little tense at the time,” I said. “I might have overreacted. A bit.”

“A little tense?” she said. “Well, then I’d hate to see what happens when you actually get angry.”

O
n the way to Blake’s robotics lab, I stopped at the door marked
“Emergency Stairwell,” and reached for the handle. “Come on,” I said to Cassie.

“What about this?” She pointed to the words painted in red on the door:
“Opening will sound alarm.”

“Ignore it,” I said, and pushed open the door.

Her gaze traveled along the edge of the door frame, until she spotted the short wire I had added to disable the alarm. “Is security really this lax around here?” she asked.

“Security’s actually so tight it’s ridiculous,” I said. “No Internet access, even though we’re the ones who created the damn Internet.”

I started up, and after a few seconds, I heard her high heels echoing on the metal stairs below me.

At the top of the stairwell, five floors up, I opened the fire door and stepped out onto the roof. The bright sunlight made me squint.

“From up here, you can see the layout of the whole facility,” I said.

Cassie wove between the air-conditioning units to join me at the railing. She looked out over the vast blue expanse of the lake.

“Trying to get me fired my first day?” she asked.

“Nobody monitors the roof,” I said, pointing at Blake’s oversize cylindrical bucket ashtray. “Blake comes up here all the time to smoke.”